


The Harness of Our Gold; Here Come the Tears

by Zagzagael



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 10:26:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10592094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: AU - Before The Dark Curse. What if Rumplestiltskin realized that Belle had been abducted and imprisoned by The Evil Queen, and he decided to rescue her? After True Love's Kiss?And what if it was a trap set by The Evil Queen to destroy Rumplestiltskin by destroying Belle?And what if Rumple knows, even if Belle does not, that unloosing the beast means they will have no Happy Ending?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Endangered_Slug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Endangered_Slug/gifts).



_Forgiveness and forgetting are not the same thing_ , he wished he had told her. In the seconds that stretched out between them - a chasm of death and destruction, unbridgeable - the thought that he should have told her such appeared inside his mind, this strangely foretelling sentence. One of his teasing little riddles, his silver-tongued adages, a giggling pronouncement of inane wisdom punctuated with a decidedly irreverent flourish of his hand. But he hadn’t. And how much difference would it have made regardless. With the turret room now painted beamed ceiling to floor, the walls awash, in the blood and bone and viscera of the Evil Queen, her father, two of her be-spelled henchmen, and the annoying Genie. Just he and Belle were left whole and alive in the room-turned-cell and as he watched her look up at him, in that very moment, a sizable chunk of heart meat dislodged from the ceiling and fell down down down onto her shoulder and with nary a flinch or a grimace, she brushed it from her person and onto the floor where it made a truly gruesome sound as it hit and splattered more gore upon her unshod feet. 

He wanted to close his eyes but could not. It would have been a betrayal.

"Oh, Belle." Her name a cutting blade in his throat. His hands helpless to reach out, frozen as though trapped in squid ink, but it was not his horror at what he had done that held him but rather his understanding of what he had undone.

"Thank you," she whispered. 

She actually uttered words of gratitude, wiping blood from her face with the inside of her wrist. He thought his stomach would flip completely over and empty itself. But it didn’t and he held her gaze, inclining his head in the slightest motion of recrimination. 

"She would have crushed your heart-" He could hear his apology, the pleading of his justification. For love. 

"I know!" She interrupted him, too quickly, too loudly. Then bent her head and whispered again, "I know that, Rumple. You saved me." There was a crescent-thin waver in her voice.

"By annihilating her and and and-" Words were useless so he waved an impatient hand at the detritus of Belle’s captors. 

"Should I?" she hesitated and her vacillation was injurious to him. "Should I kiss you now? Release you from your curse?" 

He was boggled by this and took a quick step backwards, away from her, both hands up as though a shield. "You must be joking. You think True Love’s Kiss can weather this brutality, this destruction? Look inside yourself, my Lady, and be honest." He turned from her expression and waded further away from her through the muck to the narrow window. The Enchanted Forest spread before him, once a maiden full of promise, now a crone on her death bed. How had he allowed this to happen? It was worse than Baelfire commanding him to murder Beowulf. Belle had not held the dagger, she simply had let him off his leash, unloosed the monster she had spent so many months holding in check, with a nod of her head, a signal between them that had never been preordained but was as clear a message as if she had shouted out, _Now, Rumpelstiltskin, destroy them all!_ He could not begin to imagine the words in her mouth, but his ears were filled with her cries. 

And destroy he had. Regina and her father. The armoured henchmen in their ridiculously overwrought helmets. The genie. All of them plotting against him, setting him up, the Dark Curse nothing but a chess piece on a board half-obscured. Regina readying to thrust her hand into Belle’s breast and pull out her heart. He could never have allowed that. Not that. 

"As payment then?"

His heart stumbled and then staggered. Forgive, forget. Repent, wipe clean the debt owed. He wasn’t one to repent ever ever but surely he paid penance, both of them drenched in the blood of their enemies. 

Baelfire lost forever now. Centuries of well-laid plans dashed aside, the destruction total, there would be no salvaging, he had needed the Evil Queen, had twisted her to his own ends, and now it was all for naught. No happy endings for any of them.

~***~ 

It had been far too easy to find Belle, stolen away from him, from her responsibilities as maid(en), the Dark Castle, her own life. Once he began to search her out, he refused to remember his role in her disappearance. The shouting, nay screaming, in her face. Monstrous behavior from a monster. It was shameful and full of fear and once again he was branded coward. Holding the hot iron to his own green-gold flesh, leaving a mark he could see every single time he looked down at his body. Scarred by testimonial to his faintheartedness.  


He had chased her from him, out of any reach of his longing arms, so frightened by the beginnings of the transformation wrought by True Love’s Kiss.

Had it been the thought of recloaking himself in a man’s skin that had him raging? Or the disbelief that Belle’s love for him was true that had left him quaking?

~***~ 

Trapped in the clutches of the Evil Queen. As soon as he arrived at the castle grounds he realized that he had followed Regina’s trail so easily because she had gleefully scattered crumbs to lure the pesky pest, straight into the trap. He hadn’t been himself since the kiss of True Love, since the strange tugging sensation of the visage of the Dark One leaving him. It had been as though the curse had put his body to sleep and Belle’s kiss had woken him back up. To love, to life, to another existence. There hadn’t been time to think, it had never even been something to contemplate. He was a monster, unlovable, letting go of Baelfire's hand proof of that, and with the tingling and rushing of blood back into all his extremities, he had panicked and turned on her.

Shamed, he was.

~***~ 

Regina strutting in smaller and smaller circles. He stopped listening to her once he realized it was pontificating and ranting. Instead he concentrated on Belle, sagging between the two henchmen, each with a vicious hand on her elbow, holding her up, the quarry, the prey, the Evil Queen’s last move. He had wondered before what an endgame would look like, would he recognize it as such when presented with it, and now he marveled that he had ever even had to contemplate it. He knew it, his own heart cramping within his breast, the ribcage not enough to protect it from this assault. Knew without hesitation, without sarcastic questioning, the answer, the nightmare resolution. She was going to tear out Belle’s heart and crush it inside of her fist. He wanted to smash the hourglass, stop the world and hold fast with held breath until the threat had passed.

Belle seemed to know her fate, too, her face stricken, gaze darting between his face and the Queen’s rapid approach. 

"Don’t do this, Regina," he said, his voice a venomous serpent. 

She cackled. Another truism drenched him in sweat as he recognized it. She had him by the short hairs. He actually felt his testicles shrink and retreat into his body. 

Her father had the good graces to look confused, the Genie had the bad taste to smirk. 

"Belle," he whisper-shouted and she looked up. "Unloose me, dearheart, unleash the beast. You must."

No one but he knew that he was in her thrall. The dagger had not a thing to do with it. He was hers to control.

"You need to beg permission from this slip of a girl, Rumple?" The Evil Queen nearly shrieked with the pleasure of seeing him on his proverbial knees. 

That was the moment Belle closed her eyes and assented. 

And the bodies inside the room exploded.

~***~ 

"So many worlds," he had told her. Parallels and paradoxes. Universes the size of a dandelion clock or thrice that of the skies that vaulted above their heads. It was hard to comprehend. Until he took her by the elbow out into the gardens, showed her the small world of the snail and spider, further into the woods and bade her consider the nest of eggs, the tree, the rock, and she began to understand. A little. Her head was one for learning but not so much for magic. The mysticism of the cleric and the mage, the witch and the sorcerer, assailed her moral sensibilities.

He tempered this confusion with anatomy tomes that showed the mystery of the laden womb, and then books of poetry wherein the suckling babe was celebrated in long rhyme. "This, too, is magic," he had said.

"God and nature and man’s thrall is magic?" 

"Of a kind, yes." 

"And the price?" She asked, half teasing half afraid.

"There’s always a price, dearheart. Always." 

And he left her in the library and returned to the dark shadows in which he disappeared into his work. It was nearly an hour's time before Belle realized he had slipped a loving diminutive into the place he usually reserved for commonplace and slightly snide. For a long moment, she felt her heart thump out the fact of it. Then she went in search of a particular book because something was flitting around the edges of her mind. She found Anselm’s Dyetary and of course it fell open to the exact illustration and page. Of course. A flip. A stein of bock made frothy and creamy when a red-hot fireplace poker was plunged into it. She smiled, biting the edge of her thumb, that’s what his substitution of _dearheart_ for _dearie_ had felt exactly like inside the vessel of her heart.

~***~ 

He gave her a horse with golden tack. A leather pouch that could not be emptied. A small sword that would always find the throat of an enemy. And a handful of magic beans.

He allowed her to press her lips to his cheek, wetting his face with her tears, while his hands held her fast, gripping the balls of her shoulders not knowing if he was pulling or pushing.


End file.
